Product Description

"[AN] ENGROSSING DEBUT...In prose studded with passages of dark luster, Baker offers a truly original heroine."
--Publishers Weekly
Dimitri Rozokov has awakened after a sleep of one hundred years. But for a fifteenth-century Russian aristocrat--and vampire--at large in modern-day Toronto, there is no safe haven.
Ardeth Alexander is leading the predictable life of a graduate student when she is grabbed off the street and thrown into a prison cell with a dark, mysterious stranger--Dimitri Rozokov. But even more terrifying than her abduction is its purpose: she is to sustain, with her blood, the life of her fellow prisoner.
Yet once Ardeth breaks through the vampire's madness and sees the man within, the nightly feedings become more than necessity, even something to be longed for. Desperate to survive, Ardeth makes a daring decision--one fueled by the promise of immortality, the lust for revenge, and the fulfillment of desire....
"COMPELLING...BREATHLESS, LINGERING, EROTIC."
--The Globe and Mail

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #602460 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-27
• Released on: 1995-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback

From the Inside Flap
"[AN] ENGROSSING DEBUT...In prose studded with passages of dark luster, Baker offers a truly original heroine."
--Publishers Weekly
Dimitri Rozokov has awakened after a sleep of one hundred years. But for a fifteenth-century Russian aristocrat--and vampire--at large in modern-day Toronto, there is no safe haven.
Ardeth Alexander is leading the predictable life of a graduate student when she is grabbed off the street and thrown into a prison cell with a dark, mysterious stranger--Dimitri Rozokov. But even more terrifying than her abduction is its purpose: she is to sustain, with her blood, the life of her fellow prisoner.
Yet once Ardeth breaks through the vampire's madness and sees the man within, the nightly feedings become more than necessity, even something to be longed for. Desperate to survive, Ardeth makes a daring decision--one fueled by the promise of immortality, the lust for revenge, and the fulfillment of desire....
"COMPELLING...BREATHLESS, LINGERING, EROTIC."
--The Globe and Mail

Customer Reviews

Excellent Vampire Story
I am a collector of vampire novels, and after reading a few recommendations, I picked up Nancy Baker's "Kiss of the Vampire" (which by the way is also "The Night Inside)." Do not make the mistake of picking up both books like I did. It is the exact same story.

Ardeth is a graduate student living at college. She just finished a project with two of her friends (also graduate students). She is saddened when one of her friends and ex-lover dies, but that sadness also becomes wariness when the second person she was working on the project with also dies. Also, she felt at one point that she was being followed.

Her fears become reality, when while jogging on campus one morning, she is literally snatched by two men, thrown in a van, and knocked out. When Ardeth recovers she finds herself locked in a cell, with a vampire in another cell next door named Dimitri Rozokov. She finds out that she has been kidnapped to be his food source. She is terrified of the vampire, but as time passes, she realizes she is even more horrified by her sadistic kidnappers (who are making [some] snuff films for profit using the vampire).

As the days pass, Ardeth begins to see the vampire Dimitri as a person, and as they get closer, she realizes her and Dimitri will have to come up with a plan to outsmart the kidnappers. But just how far is she willing to go to live?

I don't want to give too much away, but this is an excellent, excellent story. I really enjoyed all of the characters. I would highly recommend (...).

Well written and interesting
Nancy Baker's "Kiss of the Vampire" begins with the waking of a long-dormant vampire. He has been asleep for about a century and finds out that the twentieth century holds a particularly nasty development for vampires--ultrasound. It is, therefore, rather easily that he is captured when he awakens. Shortly thereafter, Ardeth Alexander, a young graduate student, is abducted. She is taken captive and used as the food supply for the vampire.

In their dismal prison, the two, predator and prey, form an uneasy alliance against their captors. Though he takes from her without giving anything back, she has sympathy for him; he is, after all, as much a prisoner as she is, and the degradations he suffers are as bad as hers. With several women dead, Ardeth knows the fate planned for her, and she must decide whether to allow him to transform her into a vampire so that she can survive somehow.

"Kiss of the Vampire" (formerly "The Night Inside") is somewhat hard to classify. Certainly the vampires would seem to make the book fall within the horror genre, but the vampirism does not dominate the novel, much of which is a thriller that just happens to involve vampires. Unlike many thrillers, though, "Kiss of the Vampire" features an especially well-rounded protagonist. Ardeth Alexander is a complex character, a woman with flaws that make her seem very real. The vampire, a fifteenth-century Russian aristocrat, is also well drawn. These three-dimensional characters are what holds the book together through some of the slower spots (of which there are a few but not too many).

Stays with you long after reading it..
When I first read this novel I was 12 years old and like the review below, hated it. It wasn't at all like other vampire romances I had read..not overly happy or full of pretty images. But, somehow, every time I'd try to give the book away something stopped me. The images in the story always came to mind because deep down I think Nancy Baker paints a picture of how vampires would act if they were real. It may not be pretty, some of the things Ardeth and Rozokov do, but they *are* blood drinking *vampires* after all,it's their nature. This book is for readers that don't mind a darker more realistic romance between two hunters of the night. Ardeth faces many parts of the meaning of being "alive" in this book which I think will make anyone stop and think.